This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to the creation of advertisements for users of a social networking system.
In a traditional advertising model, advertising companies that advertise to consumers maintain a large inventory of advertisements intended for a variety of demographics. For this reason, advertising companies attempt to simplify the process of creating advertisements so that, ultimately, more advertising can be sold. With the advent of social networking systems, advertisers have increasingly relied on the social networking system to create advertisements within the social networking system because these advertisements interacted directly with objects and user profile information on the social networking system. However, limited advertisement inventories may create a bottleneck in generating advertisements in the social networking system on a large scale.
Interactive advertisements represent a large potential source of revenue because they greatly increase engagement among users of a social networking system. As engagement increases, users of a social networking system share more information, such as their interest in a certain rock band or plans to see an upcoming movie at a local theater. Interactive advertisements enable users to share their favorite rock bands and movies with their connections on the social networking system. This, in turn, creates viral advertising within the social networking system, engaging additional users with the interactive advertisement. As a result, the potential revenue stream from interactive advertisements on social networking systems is potentially large, and it may be increased by increasing the number of interactive advertisements available in inventory for monetization.
Third parties may help solve the bottleneck problem of creating advertisements on a social networking system. However, serious security and privacy issues must also be addressed due to the personalized data potentially available to these third parties on the social networking system. Social networking systems collect large amounts of personal information about their users, such as age, gender, physical location, as well as family pictures, videos, and email addresses. Tools have not been developed to enable third parties to create interactive advertisements on a social networking system while maintaining the security and privacy of its users.